If you go to device manager through the control panel, you'll probably see your sound driver has a yellow exclamation mark. You can try reinstalling it... if that doesn't work, it may possibly have something to do with the Windows registry, although I don't know how to fix that... (Once I "lost" my DVD drive, and after two hours of manual efforts I found a zip file, CDgone, which automatically removed the bad registry entries upon a restart... someone may have created a similar file for the sound card...)
The best option's probably to type in microsoft and that error message into google, to see what ms has to say...
(Of course the real solution's just to use Linux...
)